The online site of poet and novelist Jenni Fagan

Menu

The Truth is no.1

The truth is rattling pipes in the Carlton Arms, it’s ghosts hands all over my face at 4am when I wake and realise the Lower East Side spirit world has been alerted to my presence. It’s 84 stories. It’s high. It’s wailing. It isn’t interested in being reasonable. Don’t ask it to be reasonable. Don’t ask it to answer to reason. It’s penises all over the pavement jabbing so far into the sky they’re trying to penetrate reason. The truth is every thing you never wanted. The truth will be denied. It’s name’s not down. It’s not getting in. The truth is contraband. The truth is Broadway. It’s never been Wall Street. It’s a bracelet you can’t afford. Bracelets are so close to handcuffs. Handcuffs are so close to wonder. It’s two people touching each other up on the Bowery while I wish was in love and you pretend you’re not watching. The truth is E & 23rd. It’s a woman rollerblading out the grocery store and weaving straight through oncoming traffic with upside down crosses all over her trousers. The truth is a secret knock. The truth isn’t listening. The truth is your brother. The truth is you have no brothers. The truth is you have three brothers and you never knock. The truth’s got all the cigarettes and all the alcohol and it steals petunias. The truth is waiting. The truth is in a bar and it’s about to get kicked out for the third time this week. The truth has went to bed. The truth is someone you’ve not lain with yet. The truth is you won’t ever sleep again. The truth is you’re already sleeping. The truth is you want to be in that bed of acceptance and hope and love and cherish-ability so badly you chop off your fingers. The truth is it is stupid to chop off your fingers. What are you going to hold a cup of tea with for a start? The truth is — that bed has feet like claws and tiny, fat, muscular chicken legs. It gallops through the streets at night whilst you hold on screaming. The truth is that the truth is that the truth is. The truth is pretty but it’s also fucking yellow. The truth is I don’t trust people. The truth is I trust some people but never ones who drive anything yellow. The truth is I don’t trust money. The truth is. The truth. The truth is not the road to Happiness. The truth is 63 cents. Have a nice day! the truth says. The truth is wearing a woman’s dress and frilly, frilly knickers. The truth does not have hairy legs. The truth won’t run a bath for you. The truth is barely legal. The truth wants to know your incapabilities. You struggle to spell incapabilities. The truth is rich people look out their windows and wonder what we are going to do to them and they are frightened of us and a bit disgusted too, so they pay lots of people like us to shoot lots of people like us — if any of us get too close. The truth is they should wonder. The truth is they are murdering scientists at the Arctic. The truth is in France. The truth is some men wouldn’t know the truth if if was gold plated and delivered by Willy Wonka in an elevator full of uranium. The truth is a Godzilla figure screwed to the top of a NYPF truck. The truth is a Brooklyn accent as he walks by me and I debate taking his hand and reading him a poem. He is the truth and the truth is me. The truth is female. The truth is an honest fuck. The truth is white feathers float by my window and once one changed all direction to fall directly into my hand. The truth is too many people have tattoos now. The truth is I should give more of a fuck about my waistline and less about ideology. The truth is ideology is only based on ideas. The truth is they sell ideas as if they were a true thing, a fixed thing, an unfixable thing. The truth is if kids were born into a world of ultimate tolerance with a lifetime to be loved, fed, held and given time to think and respond and create then the human race, would finally evolve but we don’t want that, do we? Fuck that. Let’s vote in the kind of psychopaths who’ll gladly nuke us all to death. Or just fuck with us until we wish they had. The truth is it’s time to kill your gods. Every last one of them. The truth is those gods were all female and it was fuck all to do with original sin (check your faulty chromosome XY’s) but the transcribers had issues with truth. The truth is no men are equal. The truth is there are two kinds of people. The ones who own the people with all the guns and the ones who don’t. Crooks and heroes. The truth is against Captain America. The truth is the good guys are the bad guys. So says all the rulers. The truth is there’s many crooks and they’re closing down libraries and that’s barely the tip of it but the truth is they don’t read but even more than that they really, really, really, don’t want us to fucking read. The truth does not go down in history. The truth has an alibi. The truth might not be televised but it will certainly be on You.Tube. The truth is if you grab a woman by her vagina the first time you meet her what you are trying to do is send a message to the creator of all life (you hate that we the bearers of the vessel of life, brought you here and made you feel so fucking helpless) you are trying to tell the creator you know where to find them and that you can reduce the mystery of life to meat. The truth is rapists and robbers run countries all over the globe. The truth is they own the people who own the guns who own the prisons who own the hospitals who own the schools who own the banks who own the money who own the law who own the healthcare who own the welfare system who own the King, Queen, Jack and Jill of clubs. The truth is hateful. The truth is afraid. The truth should be afraid. The truth is they say we’re helpless. The truth is we are not helpless. The truth is they say we’re brainwashed, numb-fuck, capitalist, lethargic, apathetic, uncaring, stupid, nullified fuckabiilly germ-craters with pennies for eyes. The truth is we let five strange men who call themselves government kill the world and we let them do it because they call themselves government but more because they are murderous and terrifying and we are all of us tired. They also killed your neighbour. They kill you softly so you won’t complain. You would complain but you’re one-billion and three in the queue. Your call is important to us. The truth is they. They go inside your stomach and tell your unborn child it will never be free. They tell it there is something wrong with it. They tell it there will be many more things wrong with it when it comes into the world. There’s nothing wrong with your unborn baby. In all its complexity it is utterly perfect. They are they. They are happiest at Easter. They are happiest on days when it is said men without a heartbeat, essentially corpses, rise from the dead from these caves where they’ve been staying and then they decide that dying for our sins is you know, pretty much a job for the boys and the kind of thing you have to do again and again and they make their hearts beat and angels push boulders down hills and blah-de-fucking-blah-de-blah-blah. I say they because Jesus was one of them. One of the lads. He was on the football team. They like women who look like dolls. They like women who fuck like dolls. They like to piss on them. That’s called fake news. They hate women. That will never be news. They hate women because we made them and pushed them out our bodies into a universe without explanation and so they took up their birthright-baton as tyrannical murderous demigods, because a trail of fucking con men before them persuaded the great and the good of the masses that we had no choice but to sign up for many, many lifetimes of hideous fuckery. The truth is we can’t take the truth. The truth is we’re not bred for it. The truth is we are all institutionalised but some are more institutionalised than others. The truth is the ruling elite are some of the most heavily, generationally, institutionalised people on the entire planet. They believe there is only us and them. There is in fact only them. The truth is two old people walking down a street holding hands. The truth is the boy on the bicycle was shooting just to the left of me into traffic so I thought that was okay then. The truth of it is — I want. The truth is sitting a US citizen test — in Disneyland. It’s legal to murder there. Ask them why Dahmer was their biggest fan. It’s all performance on the streets. The sense of performance is palpable. It’s gold boulders. Its crossing the road. It’s the stop/walk sign. It’s the man on the desk at Trump building getting ever more uncomfortable because of the habit I have of looking someone right in the eye when I want to know an honest answer. The truth is fiction. It’s a not-for-profit corporation. It’s men owning women’s bodies. It’s a war on women being declared legislation by legislation. It’s voting in a rapist. It’s voting in a government across the sea (my way) who used to be ran by a child abuser and who weren’t really voted in and who don’t care a fuck for the great unwashed anyway. It’s voting in a woman who wants to hunt foxes down and starve the poor and she too appears to be (apparently) guided by God. Aye, aye, aye, okay then. The truth is someone holding your hand. Its laying in the dark knowing you are nothing to the machine but knowing you are the centre of your own universe. It’s being accountable to the stars, the soil, the future and that long line of ancestors all chain-smoking fucking furiously and watching your every fucking move. It’s your cock inside me. It’s your face when you come. The truth is women taste better. The truth is there’s little point to boxes when nothing about me is square. The truth is knocking. The truth is better late than never. The truth is we all deep down inside know that fear when waking in the dead of night. The kind of dread that could drive us from our bed and out into the street naked and screaming and inconsolable, the kind that makes an old woman drown herself rather than have her neighbours see … she’s frightened of living another minute in her skin on this earth, she is frightened as a child, she has become pure terror because she knows what the bogeyman says and the bogeyman says it’s raining. The truth is you should grow your pubes back. The truth is 1% Iberian. The truth is on a train in Moscow. It’s on the fifteenth chair in the second most cabin. The truth is they’re murdering gay men in Chechnya. They’re throwing them off buildings in public in Iran. The truth is I know a woman who got stoned to death in the street last week. She dared to hold her lovers hand in public. The truth is I know that woman you know that woman you are that woman — the truth is a boat with a hundred people on it many of them crying, terrified, gripping the sweaty hands of children — that is your fucking boat and it is my fucking boat and all the people we love are on it. The truth is we are letting paedophiles and traffickers in at the Woolworths pick and mix of women and children in camps so close we could walk to them. Those kids are you, those people are you, they are you in another fucking life. The truth is the people who own the people who own the guns who own the prisons who own the psychiatrists who own the courts who pledge allegiance to the bogeyman who tell the fuhrer he did not kill himself in vain who let white supremacists march through the streets right here and now under the guise of fucking liberty — right fucking here today — the same ones who only made it illegal to rape your wife in the UK in 199-fucking-3 (in what is supposed to be one of the most civilised countries on earth), who killed their last witch in the 50s, who hung their last inmate in the 60s, who allied with a country who took away reproductive rights from women this year so we would know our bodies are owned by the bogeyman and he can do whatever the fuck he likes with our baby machines and our silly, silly idea that we were ever even vaguely equal in the eyes of men like him. The truth is little rich boys take the earth for their shiny plaything. The truth is we are all expendable and some of us, people of colour, LGBT, the disabled, the poor, Mexicans, Latinos, the Ukraine, the future space travelling children of Korea, all of the women, all of the children, all of the working class, all of the underclass, all of the weird, the strange, the brilliant, scientists, writers, we are more expendable than others and expend us they will. The truth is if we shush-the-fuck-up who’s going to hold our hand when they mow all of us down? The truth is this planet is yours. This is your planet. Those stars are shining just for you. You are meant to be here. The truth is you are beautiful. The truth is we are only in the beginning. The truth is we have to begin — now. Again. Over. The truth begins with light.